Friday, May 11, 2012

Making Our Way Around, Starting in Freret

We
ended up on Freret Street after a drive down Louisiana and our first
glimpses of the grand Garden District. Freret Neighborhood is an
awesome area to walk around in, offering all kinds of restaurants, bars,
and eclectic local shops. We stopped to have lunch at Dat Dog,
absolutely incredible. They offer local sausages, alligator sausage,
bratwurst, and they come on a fresh bun with any sort of topping you can
imagine. They also make their own sodas, have an excellent beer
selection, an open kitchen with a lot of personality, and, of course, a
lot of hipster flair. I chose the spicy sausage from Kenner, LA, with
andouille sauce, onion, cheese, creole mustard, and jalapenos, I am down
with the heat as an eater, but this all together wasn't overwhelmingly
spicy. It was soooo good! It hasn't even been a week and I cannot wait
to go back. Aaron got the alligator sausage with chef's choice, which
ended up just being an onion and red tomato pico and rather uninspiring.
The sausage was excellent though, it wasn't stringy or gamey, it was
moist and absolutely delicious. Both sausages were cooked perfectly,
crispy on the outside, juicy and flavorful on the inside. We also got
the fries with etouffee, sour cream, and tomato, we had just arrived to
N’awleans so we had to go with ettouffee and it was everything I
imagined. Tons of crawfish in the sauce, great crustacean flavor, and
the tomato and sour cream were incredible palatal additions with the
fresh and hot crunchy fries. Just like most of the good places in NOLA,
Dat dog is cash only but sports an ATM right near the entrance in case
you forget.

While
feasting on this incredible meal Aaron got a phone call and was
accepted for a handyman job he had applied to the night before and had
to start that day. Our very first day in town. I took him to the
sight, and began my search alone for an apartment. We weren't trying to
live in a boujee apartment complex or going through a lot of bullshit
with realtors, we wanted a very chill house hopefully with a yard for
the dog. I drove this town for almost six hours looking at all the
addresses I had painstakingly researched and compiled between the
Picayne and Craigslist. While looking online for apartments from
Winston-Salem I used Google earth to try to see what the street and
house looked like, and was surprised that most of the houses still had
FEMA trailers around them. I looked at my own house in Winston and saw
that that picture was at least two years old because we had had a fence
installed two years ago and this picture had no fence. I tried to keep
this in perspective while apartment hunting. I was amazed to see that,
although there weren't many FEMA trailers left, there was a plethora of
condemned buildings. No luck finding a house today.

Tonight
we are camping out about twenty minutes outside of town at St. Bernard
State Park. The park is great, far enough from NOLA to
feel like true country swamp, but let your pets sleep in the tent with
you, there are relatively large animals tromping in the woods at night;
and, as almost everywhere down here, bring the strongest bug spray you
can find.